“Generating more leads” emerged as the foremost challenge for B2B marketers in this 2013 survey, even more important than “elevating our brand online.” This study also showed that while B2B marketers care about quantity of leads, they care even more about lead quality.

Somewhere in this list of 98 lead generation strategies are several you can begin using today. The author recommends using a diversified mix of lead generation strategies and focusing on the ones which produce the best results. Most people only use two or three of the lead generation strategies on this list, but they should have a “diversified portfolio” of at least seven.

According to the author, the five best lead generation strategies are referrals, networking, cold calling, partnerships, and content marketing. Content marketing isn’t new — brands such as Jell-O, John Deere, and Michelin have used it for over a century — but the rise of the Web and search engines in the 1990s has made it a more powerful tool than ever before.

Deciding how to allocate your time in content marketing can be challenging. How do you get the most bang for your buck? Four content marketing tactics consistently demonstrate results: hosting webinars, blogging industry events, creating ebooks and whitepapers, and setting up LinkedIn groups.

Dan McDade plays the old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy contrarian by espousing the virtues of outbound lead generation strategies versus inbound approaches. Ironically, his website borrows heavily from the inbound marketing playbook by offering white papers and a steady stream of educational content on his blog. But to be fair, Mr. McDade has a good point: Your B2B company should use a well-rounded mixture of lead generation techniques — otherwise, you might get “inbounditis”!

A successful lead generation strategy will combine both inbound and outbound tactics. An efficient and effective inbound marketing campaign requires familiarity with the goals, plans, challenges, and motivations of your buyers. Outbound lead generation campaigns are a good way to get to your buyers better while making new sales in the process.

Here at IXP we have respected Dave Ramsey for a long time. We appreciate his emphasis on debt-free living as well as his no-nonsense approach to personal finances.

More recently, we have been reading and learning from Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership, which someone has described as Dave Ramsey’s “business playbook.” It’s a great read, highly recommended if you want your business to grow.

Last week, the EntreLeadership website published a great little article called “Three Steps to a Better Marketing ROI.” That article was the inspiration for this post, because it connects to what we do here at IXP: Help you drive profit growth by improving your online marketing ROI.

So I want to piggyback on the EntreLeadership article by looking at six things:

Three potential distractions from improving your online marketing ROI

1. Flashy design

Design does make a difference, because it helps you build rapport with your buyers. But content (text, images, video, audio, etc.) is the most important factor in the effectiveness of your website and online marketing program. The purpose of your website design should be to highlight your content and enhance the perception of your brand. It should never be so flashy that it distracts from the message of your website.

2. Buying online ads

Pay-per-click ads can be a good investment in some situations. However, ads cannot (and should not) be the primary focus of your marketing efforts. Online ads are a marketing tactic, not a marketing strategy.

3. Mobile apps

Like online ads, mobile apps are a marketing tactic, not a marketing strategy. Unless mobile apps are what your business sells, or you can demonstrate that they are central to your business model, building a mobile app is probably a distraction. On the other hand, you should make sure that your website employs responsive web design.

photo credit: Eduardo Amorim (Creative Commons license)

Three key success factors for improving your online marketing ROI

1. Content marketing strategy

Content is the decisive factor in improving your online marketing ROI. Content comes in many forms: blog posts, e-books, white papers, podcasts, videos, infographics, and more. Content marketing is necessary to attract traffic to your website, convert visitors into leads, and turn leads into customers. You must have a well-articulated and well-executed content marketing strategy in order to drive profit growth.

Dave Ramsey’s websites (DaveRamsey.com, MyTotalMoneyMakeover.com, and EntreLeadership.com) make a great case study of this principle. Dave Ramsey formed his company, The Lampo Group, in 1988 — just a couple years after losing everything due to poor debt management. He published his first book, Financial Peace, in 1992. In 1996, he launched DaveRamsey.com, and began syndicating his radio show. By 2001, DaveRamsey.com was a full-fledged e-commerce website and was “making a modest contribution to company revenue,” according Patrica Seybold Group’s 2011 case study of DaveRamsey.com.

Ramsey makes no secret about the fact that a robust content marketing strategy has fueled the growth of his website from March 2013 and, in turn, his company. In 18 years, he has put a truckload of content on his site: Google estimates that it has over 500,000 pages from DaveRamsey.com in its index. As he often says: “If you help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money.”

2. Marketing ROI analysis

This is a concise way of saying “measuring what works and what doesn’t work.” Define your goals. Fire up your content marketing strategy. Then track your progress toward those goals.

There are a variety of tools for online marketing ROI analysis:

Google Analytics – The features of this free tool from Google continue to grow. This is a great place to start and, when properly configured, provides helpful insights into traffic acquisition and lead conversion.

HubSpot – HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software allows you to put faces to your website traffic data. HubSpot’s analytics tools allow you to measure not only how many website visitors turned into leads, but also how many leads became customers. HubSpot calls this “closed-loop analytics,” because it shows you the path your customers took to close.

Adobe Marketing Cloud – This is an enterprise-level analytics platform the Lampo Group has used to analyze and optimize the ROI of DaveRamsey.com.

3. Knowing your buyers

This is the most necessary success factor. You must know your buyers in order to develop a customer-centric content marketing strategy. Only a customer-centric content marketing strategy will attract the right visitors to your website, convert visitors into leads, and turn leads into customers.

Knowing your buyers is a constant challenge, but it is one we thrive on as marketers. Thankfully, there are tons of helpful tools you can use to get to know your buyers better. Creating buyer personas is essential. Understanding the buyer’s journey is crucial. Many businesses fly by the seat of their pants here, relying on intuitions. Successful salespeople usually have good intuitions about who their buyers are and what makes them tick.

However, imagine what kind of profit growth you could realize if you took the time (1) to research your buyers’ needs, motivations, and decision-making criteria and (2) to document and publish this information throughout your organizations. Buyer personas and buyer’s journey charts provide the context your entire organization needs to stay on track.

“Managing the business, sales, and marketing for a local non-profit (like a community-based symphony orchestra) is hard work. A local symphony orchestra has to attract and retain talented musicians, promote ticket sales, create marketing buzz, grow the donor base, incentivize corporate sponsorships, and balance the budget — all in perfect harmony and without skipping a beat.”

As we stated in part 1, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) received local SEO scores of 26% and 38% in two tests, and an inbound marketing grade of 67%. (100% is a perfect score.) The DSO is doing some great things with social media, but still has room for improvement. (To be fair in benchmarking the DSO, we’ll have to run the same standard tests against cities with a similar population size. We have not identified those cities yet. Stay tuned.)

In part 2 we’ll examine the “local SEO” and “inbound marketing test scores” of several smaller community orchestras around the Motor City. We chose Dearborn, Livonia, Rochester, and Royal Oak – several suburbs of Detroit. The test scores are revealed below. 100% is a perfect score.

Dearborn Symphony Orchestra

A screenshot from the Dearborn Symphony Orchestra homepage –

The city of Dearborn, Michigan has a population of nearly 100,000 people, and the Dearborn Symphony Orchestra is currently playing it’s 52nd season. The Dearborn Symphony has a local SEO score of 31%, and an inbound marketing score of 40%.

Livonia Symphony Orchestra

The city of Livonia, Michigan also has a population of nearly 100,000 people. The Livonia Symphony Orchestra is in it’s 40th season. Their local SEO score was 34%, and their inbound marketing score was 42%.

Rochester Symphony Orchestra

The city of Rochester, Michigan has population of almost 13,000 (although Rochester Hills has a population of around 72,000). The Rochester Symphony Orchestra is in it’s 53rd season. Their local SEO score was 0% (zero), and their inbound marketing score was 13%.

Royal Oak Symphony Orchestra

The city of Royal Oak, Michigan has a population of roughly 58,400 people. The Royal Oak Symphony Orchestra is celebrating it’s 19th season in the Royal Oak area. Their local SEO score was 0% (zero) also, and their inbound marketing score was 24%.

Making great music is not easy. Managing the business, sales, and marketing for a local non-profit (like a community-based symphony orchestra) is hard work. When I say it’s difficult, I’m not just ‘whistling Dixie’.

Then there’s the problem of competition from other musical genres… and let’s face it — the internet is changing everything. The calm status-quo of our quaint villages (and ‘time honored’ marketing methods) — are constantly challenged and bombarded by a world-wide cacophony of competing messages, and the stacato tweets of social media. Don’t worry. They’re just tuning up…

(Warning: The video above is rated PG-13 and may not be family friendly.) The rise of the internet is the biggest disruption to the music business since the War of 1812. Yes – the internet cyborg eats small business for breakfast, feasts on stodgy-old corporations for lunch, and burbs up the bones of non-profits after a late-night snack — like an all knowing (but hungry) old owl.

Yesterday we analyzed several local symphony orchestras – in the Metro-Detroit area. As expected, some of them are struggling with things like SEO, local SEO (search engine optimization) and social media strategies.

Detroit Symphony Orchestra

A screen shot from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra homepage – dso.org

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) received local SEO scores of 26% and 38% in two tests, and an inbound marketing grade of 67%. (100% is a perfect score.) The DSO is doing some great things with social media, but still has room for improvement. We love Detroit and we’re proud of the DSO – so don’t take it personal. The Motor City is home to many engineers that understand ‘process improvement’ – and that’s what this is about.

In future posts we’ll examine the testing scores of other orchestras from around the motor city, and around the nation. You might be curious to know which smaller cities are ranking higher – the Dearborn Symphony Orchestra or the Royal Oak Symphony Orchestra? By testing similar organizations, some benchmarks for performance will be established. We’ll be reporting on the test scores and providing more details. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, begin thinking about how Inbound Marketing can benefit your organization. Does inbound marketing only work for B2B organizations? What about non-profits? What about your business?

Inbound Methodology – A New Rhythm?

If great content is the melody, and social media sings harmony, what is the rhythm?

‘Inbound marketing methodology’ is a practice of internet marketing that some organizations are learning. There are four simple steps. However, some education, re-training and practice is involved — so it’s not exactly a waltz in the park.

You know you want to generate more sales leads from your website. What you may not know is the most efficient and effective way to do so.

It starts with buyer personas. You need to define the kind of leads you want to get.

In this blog post, I want to walk you through a seven-step process for using buyer personas to generate more leads from your website:

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the purpose and value of buyer personas.

Step 2: Arm yourself with some great examples and templates.

Step 3: Create a rough draft of the buyer persona.

Step 4: Get out of the building and talk to some buyers!

Step 5: Adjust your buyer persona based on what you learned from talking to the buyers.

Step 6: Create at least one content offer designed for your buyer persona and put it behind a form.

Step 7: Start blogging to members of your buyer persona group.

The Thinker by Rodin

What thought process do your customers go through when they are deciding whether to buy your product or service? (Photo of The Thinker by AndrewHorne – public domain; from the Wikimedia Commons)

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the purpose and value of buyer personas.

If your business sells products or services primarily to other businesses, you often deal with long sales cycles. You are selling things which are either complex or expensive (probably both). Before deciding to buy from you, your buyers engage in a multi-step process of active research, sometimes called “the buyer’s journey.”

Buyer personas are a tool you can use to guide the content strategy of your website. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself: “My website doesn’t have a content strategy — I don’t even know what that is!” Well, if you have a website, you have a content strategy. It may be a bad content strategy and/or an unarticulated content strategy. But if you are in business and you have a website, you have already made some decisions about your content strategy by default.

Same with buyer personas. Knowing your buyers is fundamental to entrepreneurship and business. If you’re in sales, this comes to you almost instinctively. Even if you don’t have a buyer persona written down, I’m sure you still have an idea of who you want to sell your products and services to. Everyone in business has buyer personas in mind as they create their products or package their services. The question is not whether you are using buyer personas. The question is whether your buyer personas are accurate and well-articulated.

You with me so far? The purpose of creating a a buyer persona is to crystallize what you know about your buyers (who they are, what they want, how they make decisions, and why they do what they do). The value of creating a buyer persona comes from the process you must go through to learn more about your buyers in a disciplined way.

“A buyer persona is an example of the real person who buys, or might buy, products like the ones you market, based on what you’ve learned from direct interviews with real buyers.” (Adelle Revella, founder of the Buyer Persona Institute).

“Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.” (Tony Zambito).

Step 2: Arm yourself with some great examples and templates.

Learning about your buyers is about asking the right questions about them, and asking them the right questions. Creating a buyer persona is simply the process of researching your buyers and documenting what you’re learning about them.

Thankfully, there are oodles of great examples of buyer personas. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can have a lot of fun creating buyer personas.

Buyer Persona Examples

What does a finished buyer persona look like? There are as many examples are there are marketers.

Step 3: Create a rough draft of the buyer persona.

Remember that I am assuming that lead generation is one of the primary metrics by which you will measure the success of your buyer persona research process. I am also assuming that as a business person, you don’t have the time or the desire to sit around in your cubicle or a conference room coming up with a buyer persona.

That’s good.

To make buyer personas work for your business, you need to subscribe to a couple of fundamental tenets:

Iterate, iterate, iterate. It might take several hours and several working sessions to complete a buyer persona. If you’re a perfectionist, you’re going to be tempted to come up with the perfect buyer persona the first time. Forget it. That’s not gonna happen.

Get out of the building! You need to talk to actual buyers. Don’t try to make this stuff up out of your own head. See Step 4 below.

But before you move to Step 4, pick one of the templates I listed above, and create a “rough draft” buyer persona. By the way, a good rule of thumb is that your business probably sells to at least three to five distinct buyer personas.

For example, here is a rough draft buyer persona I created a couple of weeks ago as I thought about the inbound marketing services side of our business:

Eddie Executive

Eddie Executive is a top business executive (CEO, president, vice-president) of a private company with at least $500K in sales revenue and at least 5 to 7 employees. His job performance is measured by his ability to maximize the long-term sales revenue and profit margin of the company. His company has a national or international market and primarily provides products and services for other businesses. Chances are good that Eddie’s company is in one of the following industries: industrial supplies, professional services, tech security, software, network equipment, shipping, or printing.

Eddie’s typical day is full of meetings, phone calls, and emails as he builds his network, directs the strategy of his company, sets goals, manages his team, and monitors progress toward those goals. Eddie is a persuasive communicator, a decisive servant-leader, and possesses top-notch time management, problem solving, and decision making skills.

I guarantee you that this buyer persona is going to get a lot better and a lot more useful to me over time. But I had to start somewhere. And so do you.

Step 4: Get out of the building and talk to some buyers!

“Get out of the building” is a phrase you hear a lot from Stanford entrepreneurship professor and start-up guru Steve Blank. When he teaches his entrepreneurship class at Stanford, he requires his students to get out of the building and conduct extensive “customer discovery.” Essentially he is asking them to construct buyer personas by talking to real buyers. He is teaching them to build their business around their buyers.

As an owner or manager of an established business, “getting out of the building” can take many forms. It may mean talking to existing customers, giving them a phone call, taking them out for coffee, or sending them an email. If you’re trying to introduce new products and services, it may mean meeting some new people in circles you don’t normally frequent.

Here’s an example:

As I created the example of the Eddie Executive buyer persona above, it soon became painfully obvious that I was grasping at straws because I don’t know many “Eddie Executives” yet. So I asked myself: “How can I ‘get out of the building’ to make this buyer persona more realistic?”

Step 5: Adjust your buyer persona based on what you learned from talking to the buyers.

Remember, to make buyer personas work for your business, you need to iterate, iterate, iterate! After you get out of the building, you need to go back to your buyer persona and adjust it.

To fine-tune your buyer persona, you will need to hone in on your buyers’ decision-making processes. As buyer persona guru Adele Revella says, “When marketers start with the objective to understand how buyers make the decision they want to influence, they’re building about half as many personas and uncovering insights that tell them exactly what they can (and cannot) do to impact those buyers’ decisions.”

In short, you get the most bang for your buck by focusing on the behavior and motivations of your buyers rather than their incidental demographic characteristics.

Step 6: Create at least one content offer designed for your buyer persona and put it behind a form.

But this post is about lead generation from your website. To begin generating leads, you need to create at least one juicy “content offer” and put it behind a form on a landing page.

The purpose of the form should be to qualify your lead in some way. For example, when I’m selling IXP’s inbound marketing services, I want to see if you are Eddie Executive: Because if you are not, IXP’s inbound marketing services might not be a good fit for you.

Content offers come in many flavors:

eBooks

Whitepapers

Checklists

Infographics

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Worksheets/Calculators

Templates

Case Studies

Comparison Charts

Purchasing Guides

You can have a lot of fun with content offers. And especially if you are in a B2B company, your buyers will love them.They will love them so much that they’ll be willing to tell you who they are in exchange for getting a freebie from you.

The key is to figure out what kind of content offer provides value to members of your buyer persona group. Chances are good you already have some content laying around which you use during the sales process: You might just need to polish it up a bit and turn it into a PDF.

Step 7: Start blogging to members of your buyer persona group.

Now that you have your first content offer, it’s time to start talking it up. Write juicy blog posts related to your content offer. Put a call-to-action graphic at the bottom and/or on the side of each one which promotes your content offer. Promote your content offer on social media and email blasts.

That’s it, really. Getting started with buyer personas isn’t complicated or esoteric. But there is an art to it. You need to be willing to ask lots of questions and seek to understand before insisting on being understood. And then you need the right technology and the right team to use your buyer personas to create a profitable inbound marketing system.

Choosing the colors for your new website can get a little crazy. It’s really not difficult — but with the plethora of tools and resources available, it can get more complicated than it needs to be. If you’re not careful you can come up with some frightening or obnoxious color combinations. Let’s see what we can learn from Little Boy Blue, and Little Robin Redbreast.

Little Boy Blue

Little boy blue, come blow your horn. The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn… you’ve studied hex codes since the day you were born …

I tried the color palette generator by DeGraeve, but was frequently unhappy with the results (see above and below). The tool allows you to upload an image and it automatically generates a color palette from the colors found in the image. Sometimes it provides an interesting color palette, but other times it misses the mark. Where’s the blue? It’s like the little boy is under a haystack, fast asleep — or maybe his head’s stuck in a cloud.

Creating More Color Palettes

So I started using PhotoCopa from Colour Lovers — which also generates a color palette from any image that you upload — but provides more options and control. (See below.)

You can set five colors in the palette and adjust each one as needed. When you click on the color, it reveals the HTML hex-code, etc.

If you are not happy with one of the color selections, you can cancel it (x), and pick another color. You can also enlarge a section of the photo, focus in on specific colors, and select specific colors you want included in the palette. (See below.)

The example above is actually getting close to the color palette I think we need for this website (ixp123.com), but I’m still not happy, so let’s try another image. The photograph below shows some of the people on our design team. Daniel is on the left. Talitha is typing on the Mac, and I’m little boy blue.

Here’s the color palette we created from the photograph, using the PhotoCopa tool :

Let’s look at one more example — this time with some warmer colors …

Little Robin Redbreast

Little Robin Redbreast, came to visit me; This is what he whistled, thank-you for my tea … Here’s the little robin (photo/image below) that we’ll use to create our color palette.

How does the weatherman know what I’m thinking?

It’s been such a cold January so far that when I checked the weather this morning, the headline said: “Will it EVER get warm again?” Yeah, no kidding! I feel like I’m living in Antarctica here!

Once I had satisfied myself that warmer weather was on the way, the next thing that caught my eye was an ad for “THE ENTREPRENEUR’S PHONE SYSTEM.” It was a display ad for Grasshopper (see below), which provides toll-free numbers for distributed teams.

How does the weatherman know how I feel, and why does the ad for that product I’m interested in keep popping up on other web pages? How do they do that?

Answer: With remarketing ads.

The Grasshopper ad above is an example of a remarketing ad. I saw it when I checked the weather this morning because a few weeks ago I visited Grasshopper’s website on the recommendation of a friend of mine who runs an insurance brokerage in Roanoke, VA.

How do remarketing ads work?

Remarketing ads are an example of behavioral targeting: You see them around the web based on the websites you visit.

Here’s how remarketing worked in the case of the Grasshopper display ad I showed you above:

When I visited the Grasshopper website, they used a variety of tracking codes (Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdRoll, and more) to collect information about me: for example, what pages I visited, how long I spent on each page, and (maybe) whether I filled out their sign-up form. (By the way, this isn’t a dirty secret: Grasshopper discloses their use of website visitor profiling in their Privacy Policy as they are required to do.)

Next, based on my behavior on the Grasshopper website, my web browser was added to a remarketing list. This involved adding a little piece of code to my web browser called a cookie.

Finally, when I visited The Weather Channel to check the forecast, they checked to see if my web browser was on the remarketing list. Since it was, they showed me the ad for Grasshopper.

How can remarketing ads benefit your company?

Remarketing ads are one way you can tap into the buyer’s journey. Remember that the buyer’s journey is the process of active research a buyer uses when contemplating a purpose. The buyer’s journey can be segmented into three parts:

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Grasshopper is using remarketing ads to pull me along the buyer’s journey. I am well aware of their “virtual phone system” service and I am considering purchasing them at some point. As Lead Web Developer for IXP, I am always looking for ways to provide a higher level of customer service to our customers. At some point, a toll-free number might be a good way to do this. But I’m not yet at the decision stage. Still, Grasshopper is very much on my radar, and their remarketing ads have helped to put them there.

You can use remarketing ads, like Grasshopper, to pull your prospective buyers along the buyer’s journey: from awareness to consideration to decision. If your company sells primarily to other businesses, you are probably dealing with a lengthy sales cycle in which your buyers conduct a multi-step research process before deciding to purchase your goods or services. Because your product or service is relatively complex and expensive, you cannot expect qualified buyers to purchase your products and services on the first visit to your website. And you cannot rely on their memories of your website, because no one has perfect recall.

In short, remarketing ads can benefit your company by providing you with a way to ensure buyers remain aware of your company and your products and services. They can’t decide to buy from you if they aren’t considering you, and they can’t consider you unless they are aware of you. And some folks with bad memories (like me) might not remain aware of you unless you remarket to them.

What vendors provide remarketing ads?

Digital advertising has been big business since the dot-com boom in the 1990s, and there a number of companies which provide remarketing ad solutions (also known as retargeting).

AdRoll – “Full service display platform with tons of great retargeting features.” You can sign yourself up with a two week free trial.

Chango – “A programmatic advertising platform that connects marketers with their exact target audience in real time across Display, Social, Mobile, & Video.” To get started, you need to send them a message, or give them a call, which means they are a high-end solution.

Criteo – Headquartered in Paris, Criteo is “a ‘personalized retargeting company’ that works with Internet retailers to serve personalized online display advertisements to consumers that have previously visited the advertiser’s website.” To get started, you need to fill out a form, and it is unclear what happens next (probably you are contacted by a sales agent).

Perfect Audience – “Perfect Audience is a retargeting platform that lets marketers effortlessly bring back lost web visitors with Facebook ads on Facebook and banner ads across the web.” There are no set up fees or minimum spend requirements, and you can get started with a two-week free trial with your email and phone number.

ReTargeter – “ReTargeter is a full-service display advertising platform specializing in audience targeting and retargeting.” Their pricing begins at $500/month, and you need to contact their sales team to get started.

Bottom line:

Google Advertising is the best place to start for the average online marketer.

The do-it-yourself options provided by AdRoll and Perfect Audience are worthy of consideration as you seek to work smarter and optimize your ROI.

The solutions provided by Chango, Criteo, and ReTargeter seem to be for high-end businesses only.

Google remarketing ads: How do they work?

First, watch this two minute video. It’s a bit dated in some of the details since it’s from 2010, but it is still the best quick video introdution available.

I want to highlight a couple key points from the video:

You manage remarketing ads in Google AdWords, not Google Analytics. This should be obvious, but I say this because the Remarketing Lists feature in Google Analytics has blurred the lines between the products and created a bit of confusion (at least for me, but then again I am not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree).

Remarketing campaigns commonly use Google Display Network to show your ads to users as they browse the web. The Google Display Network consists of millions of websites which have agreed to display advertising in exchange for a cut of Google’s advertising revenue.

This one minute video explains the concept of the Google Display Network:

Before we go further, let me address a few misconceptions about the Google Display Network and remarketing ads:

You can use the Google Display Network without a remarketing list.

Google Display Network ads are often images, but they can be text ads or multimedia ads as well.

Google Display Network is not the only network you can use for remarketing ads: You can also use remarketing lists for search ads, or mobile apps.

How to set up a remarketing campaign with AdWords and Analytics

Let’s suppose that you are the marketing director for a healthcare company with facilities in multiple states. Last year you launched a network of beautiful new websites which convey the compassionate professionalism of your operation. As a result, the vast majority of your facilities are thriving. However, a handful of facilities in specific localities are struggling due to the competitiveness of the local market. After considering the possible causes of this problem, you conclude that lack of awareness is the root cause. Your facilities have great staff and great ratings from the government inspectors. You’ve tried some search engine optimization techniques, but for whatever reason you haven’t been able to get on the first page of results in those localities yet.

Since you are looking for some results in the short-term, you decide to try a two-pronged paid advertising technique to capture additional market share:

Now it is time to build your campaigns in Google AdWords. Note that you are actually going to build two separate ad groups: The purpose of Ad Group #1 is to drive traffic to your website from search engines. Ads in Ad Group #1 are text ads, primarily on the Search Network. By contrast, Ad Group #2 uses the remarketing lists gathered by Google Analytics to serve display ads on the Google Display Network.

As with any advertising campaign, you will need to evaluate the results and make adjustments for optimal return on investment. You should plan to do this early and often.

Conclusion

If you want to learn more about remarketing ads, I recommend the following resources:

If you’re selling something small (like avocados or dental floss) the buyer’s journey might be short. For these kinds of products, the buyer research process consists of going to the grocery store and poking and prodding the avocados to make sure they aren’t rotten. Or trying to find a dental floss container that looks like a slightly larger version of what the hygienist gave you at your last dental appointment.

If you’re selling something larger, more complex, and more expensive (such as computer software, solar panels, or trucking and logistics services), the buyer’s journey is probably longer and more complex. A 2013 survey of B2B buyers revealed the following facts:

72% of B2B buyers start their research for a future business purchase on Google

82% go back online at least two or three times before seeking manager approval on a business purchase

89% say the cost of the item their researching affects the amount of research they do before purchase

76% said that they prefer different content at each stage of their research process

This research shows that the buyer’s journey for B2B products and services consists of three distinct phases, each demanding a different kind of content:

Awareness Stage – At this stage, buyer commitment is low. Content at this stage should inform and educate buyers about potential solutions to the problems they is experiencing: blog posts, e-books, and infographics are examples of appropriate content for this stage.

Consideration Stage – Buyer commitment to your product/service is growing. You want to nurture their commitment by helping them establish buying criteria and providing opportunities for live interactions such as webinars.

Decision Stage – Your potential customer is ready to buy. However, you may not be the only vendor they are evaluating. Customers at this stage need case studies, vendor comparisons, product spec sheets, and (where appropriate) a live demo, free trial, or free consultation.

Using the buyer’s journey to anchor the content strategy of your website

Your challenge is to structure your web content to demonstrate the value of your products and services at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

“When any conversation starts,” Dave Ramsey writes. “The customer sees a scale with their time and money on one side, and it is larger than the value of your good or service on the other side. Our job … is to load the ‘value’ end of the scale so heavily with education and information that the value outweighs the ‘time and money’ end of the scale for the customer and the purchase naturally occurs” (EntreLeadership, pg. 179).

How can you demonstrate the value of your products and services at every stage of your buyer’s journey?

Start by developing or refining your buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of the different categories of people who are interested in your products or services.

Answer questions such as the following as you create your buyer personas:

Who are your buyers?

What goals do they have?

What challenges do they face in reaching those goals?

You will also need to consider:

Why are they buying from you?

What value do you bring?

Once you’ve created realistic buyer personas, you can begin to anchor your website content strategy in the research process of those buyers. Your content strategy will need to include:

Will you be spinning any yarns in 2014? Is blogging part of your marketing plan? Will your business grow, and how will you measure the growth? As the old nursery rhyme said: “Blah, blah, black sheep – have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir – three bags full.” Or as my version says: “Blah, blah, blogging – having any fun? Yes sir, yes sir – my yarn is nearly spun.”

I’m not saying I’m smarter than Robert Fulghum – but all I really need to know I learned from nursery rhymes. Mother Goose taught me more about being a successful entrepreneur than Tim Ferriss – and his fantastic yarn about a 4-Hour Work Week. Why would anyone work that hard?

Simple as 1,2,3

My niche market is narrowly defined, and I’ve never been concerned about being politically correct – so the blah, blah, black sheep analogy is perfect! The problem with a lot of marketing plans is that they are too complicated and or too un-believable. My marketing plan is simple as 1,2,3. I write one good blog post per week, and I hired someone to write two more (each week). Like I said – it’s as simple as 1,2,3. Why would anyone work 4 hours per week, when they can get the job done in only 3? I’m working smarter, not harder.

If you want organic growth – you have to let the sheep graze in the field. The wool just grows by itself.

Measuring Results and Buyer Personas

Ok, you caught me. Perhaps you noticed that I misquoted the nursery rhyme – Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and I have not explained it very well. Let’s review the original rhyme and break it down.

Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, Three bags full; One for the master, And one for the dame, And one for the little boy Who lives down the lane.

Here’s the translation:

The wool symbolizes your sales revenue. Three bags full – is all about measuring the results of your inbound marketing. How many sales leads did you generate from each blog post and call to action? The ‘master’, the ‘dame’, and the ‘little boy’ are primitive examples of buyer personas. So here’s a quick summary of what we learned today.

Baa, Baa, Blah, Blah

What’s holding you back? Are you worried that people will find your blog posts too boring? Bad excuse. Very baaaad excuse. The average small business owner (organization leader) running a WordPress website publishes less than two new blog posts (or new pages) per year. Wondering why your 7 page website doesn’t rank higher in Google? Try adding more pages (or posts). By adding only one blog post (or ‘new page’ for Google to index) per week – you’ll be adding 52 new pages per year. I challenge you to write at least one new blog post each week — and measure the results.

Footnotes:

Rather than being negative, the wool of black sheep may have been prized as it could be made into dark cloth without dyeing.

In 1951, together with “In the Mood”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” was the first song ever to be digitally saved and played on a computer. (Stick that in your Pandora pipe and smoke it.)

Doug is the master, Jane is the dame, Daniel is the little boy who lives down the lane. (An alternate theory.)

In his recent book, Dave Ramsey coined the term “EntreLeadership.” EntreLeadership is a mash-up of the two words “entrepreneurship” and “leadership.” Leaders are humble, visionary, disciplined servants of those whom they lead. Entrepreneurs are passionate, think-outside-the-box, self-motivated risk-takers. Successful businesses run on EntreLeadership.

Spherical mirror in Bristol, England. Source: Wikipedia.

In Chaper 1 of EntreLeadership, Ramsey fleshes out the definition of EntreLeadership under several headings:

EntreLeaders recognize that their personal weaknesses tend to become the weakenesses of their organization.

EntreLeaders are powerful because they lead through persuasion rather than coercion.

EntreLeaders lead their team by serving their team.

EntreLeaders care deeply about what they are doing — they are passionate about the dreams, vision, mission, and goals of their organization.

But the most powerful lesson of this chapter is Ramsey’s counsel to look in the mirror:

“I am the problem with my company and you are the problem with your company” (pg. 11).

“The problem with your company is not the economy, it is not the lack of opportunity, it is not your team. The problem is you. That is the bad news. The good news is, if you’re the problem, you’re also the solution” (pg. 12).

So what are you going to do today to begin to address the problems in your business? Maybe its time to get serious about your marketing plan so you can capture those opportunities you’ve been dreaming about. Perhaps you need to clarify the mission statement of your organization. Perhaps you need to start managing your time better — i.e., stop procrastinating, stop letting yourself get distracted, start setting priorities and sticking to them. Or maybe you need to buckle down and make some decisions you’ve been putting off and agonizing over.

After reading this chapter, I realized that it is time for us at IX Publishing to get serious about re-tooling our own web presence. We write a lot about things like responsive design and search engine optimization on this blog. And we’ve demonstrated the ability to get results in these areas for our clients. But even if you are passionate about what you do, loyal to your customers’ needs, and committed to excellence — first impressions still matter.

In the web design and digital marketing business, there is always something new to learn. I’m sure it’s the same in your business, too. We’re still learning, and (by God’s grace) we’re still growing. We are grateful to you for reading this blog and to everyone who has entrusted us with their business over the past five years or so. You all are the reason we go to work every day, and we thank you.